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Tuesday, March 1, 2016

Philosophy itself
seems now to be the primary object of my thinking. Is this
particularly universal or does it indicate just another
particularity? The problem is that every universality can just as
easily be portrayed as a particularity unless it is sufficiently
formalized, i.e. put on a terrain where the question on longer
applies. But is formalization even a viable strategy? What does it
allow us to do? What conceptual work does it accomplish?

At the very least it
allows us to sidestep certain worries or disciplinary restrictions
associated with the so-called paradoxico-critical mode of thought. It
can respond with its own internal intelligibility, its
making-intelligible of its own principle of intelligibility. One
cannot say, to a sufficiently formalized philosophy, that it cannot
think what it does indeed think—the allegation of senselessness, of
nonsense, cannot apply to a system that has no sense by design, that
does not even operate in terms of sense, but in terms of
intelligibility and possibility, in other words of thought itself.

Perhaps a more
general problem is this: What is conceptual work and how do we
measure it (even if it is not simply quantitative)?

II.

Philosophy sometimes
only treats of “modes of thought” explicitly when it attempts to
critique them—but how can
one critique a mode of thinking? It is there, it exists, it is
intelligible. In critiquing all dualisms, or
the dualist mode of thinking, for example, what is philosophy doing?
It must critique dualisms only in their particularity, if it is not
to remain hopelessly abstract, something for which it often critiques
other competing philosophies. It must be specific. Critiques of modes
of thinking must proceed through application. All else is against
intelligibility itself.

III.

So
what is a system/regime of intelligibility? What is a “form of
life”? I think that these are related but not the same
thing—Livingston's comparison of Wittgenstein and Badiou (of which
I have not yet read very much at this point) intuitively promises to
confirm this. A form of life cannot be simply and straightforwardly
some sort of formal or logical system. I do believe, however, that
forms of life can be formalized—but what does this capture? What is
its use? What does it leave out?

Perhaps
the biggest question, then, one that may even precede the question of
intelligibility, is the question of form—what is it and what is its
status with regard to the non-formal? Or is asking this question
already a step back? Back from what?

If
form is exception (whether it be just one type or the essence of all
exception), why study it? What is its point? Need it be justified
from a naive standpoint of reality? Perhaps—and isn't it
obvious?--there are several (or even an infinite number of) “levels”
of exception. Exception is a process, after all. But this determinacy
obviously teaches us something about that from which it is excepted.
At the same time, there is in all cases an infinite exception, which
replaces the old regime of substantialist metaphysics.

This provides us our
two modes:

1. Specificity: form
of life?

2. Singularity:
intelligibility?

And even
singularities always exist in the plural? Yes, they must. Different
regimes of intelligilibity. And they must be extracted from the
specific.

But how is one to
except something to infinity? How to makes this great leap of
thought?